Ramblings from travels to the interior and exterior

On Calls from the Heart

(NEW YEAR’s Resolutions) Nope, we ain’t doin’ it this way this year. (Image sourced from 8share.com.)

This new year, I didn’t go about formulating a list of resolutions.

This has nothing to do with cynicism. I’m quite earnest when it comes to resolutions. People who are perpetually dissatisfied tend to be quite earnest when it comes to resolutions—it addresses a deeply felt desire to fix the self/others/the world/the cosmos.

This year, I didn’t formulate a list of resolutions because, for once, I didn’t want to create anything for 2014 that came from the context of repairing something. I’m 32 years old and I’m tired of fixing things—especially my self/others/the world/the cosmos.

So this time, I just thought I’d wait and see what would emerge as my deepest aspirations for the year. Instead of thinking things through in clear and logical fashion—the preferred method of those who live primarily in their heads, i.e., if I want to go to B from A then I have to have C, do D and be E—I thought I’d let something more primal, more incoherent and far more inarticulate point the way instead.

So far, this yielding to something opaque and unintelligible has proven itself to be a wise choice. What’s emerging are not “resolutions” of the mind—as we call these despotic decrees dependent on an unflagging and tiresome exercise of will—but yearnings of the heart. And the yearnings are simple: calls to presence, calls to poetry, and calls to people dearly loved; calls to silence, calls to solitude, and calls to a stillness deep within.

And perhaps the loudest of them all: calls to be present to my own life—appeals to stop waiting for a better time, a better place, a better me and a better cosmos.

I think this is what I’ve wanted all along, all these years, my whole life.